


Riptide

by juliasets



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Badass Sam Winchester, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Spring Break, Stanford Era, Underage Drinking, background Sam/Jessica
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 18:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16645526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliasets/pseuds/juliasets
Summary: Sam just wants to be a normal college students and normal college students go on spring break.Of course, that's when bodies begin washing up on the beach.





	Riptide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [madebyme_x](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madebyme_x/gifts).



> This was written for the [2018 Summergen fanworks exchange](https://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/), which is one of the best events in fandom. Thanks so much to the mods for keeping everything running smoothly all summer.
> 
> A thanks to the many people who beta-ed for me, including daydreaming_scribe, artherra, and probably others I've forgotten. 
> 
> Another massive thanks to [sketchydean](http://sketchydean.tumblr.com/), whose gorgeous artwork accompanies this story. Y'all should also commission her.

_Now_  
  
Sam wakes face down in the sand.  
  
It’s dark, but the moon illuminates the beach as it stretches away from where he lies prone.  
  
The quiet whisper of the surf grows into a roar as the water tumbles over his legs, surges all the way up to his chest.  
  
The tide is coming in.  
  
He drags his hands in and levers himself up. His chest twinges with the movement. The side of his face aches. Sand and salt sting in raw, open nail beds.  
  
His head is fuzzy, but instinct and training take over. He must be on a hunt. He needs to get up, get moving, stop the monster.  
  
Sam coughs wetly, throat raw.  
  
As he pushes himself into a sitting position his hand catches on something hard and sharp. There’s just enough light to make out the knife lying in the sand. He grabs it up. It’s familiar.  
  
It’s Brady’s.  
  
A memory comes back. Jessica. She had been out here. And so was a monster.  
  
It's enough to give him the energy to stumble to his feet, left arm clutched tight around his battered ribs.  
  
There’s a dark stain on the sand. Blood, a trail of it.  
  
If it bleeds, you can kill it.  
  
Strange footprints in the sand. As he follows the memories return in fits and starts.  
  
Spring break really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

 

* * *

  
  
_Several Days Earlier_  
  
Zach pulls into the brick driveway and Jess digs an elbow into Sam’s ribs. When he turns she gives him the incredulous look that he’s been studiously keeping off his own face. He grins in return, glad to not be the only one stupefied by casual wealth of the Warrens. Zach and Becky had reassured everyone that their parents wouldn’t be around at their Hilton Head vacation home because they “live in Paris half the year”, so they’d have the place all to themselves. When Sam admitted that he couldn’t swing a plane ticket, the siblings paid out of pocket for his flight into Savannah without batting an eye.

Sam had tried to tell them not to, but they insisted the several hundred dollars was nothing. Sam, who had once been kicked out of a motel room when he couldn’t dredge up $50, had a hard time relating.  
  
Sam’s still losing out on the potential income he could be earning at the coffee shop, but Brady had made a compelling case that spring break was an essential college experience that Sam shouldn’t miss out on.  
  
Also, you know. Jess was going.  
  
They all pile out of the Range Rover. Brady had grabbed shotgun when Zach picked them up from Savannah. Of course, behind everyone’s backs he’d given Sam a knowing grin with a look towards Jess. Ever since this past fall break he’d become increasingly more obvious in his attempts to wingman. Sam wanted to be annoyed, but chatting with Jess on the ride over about her family’s previous vacations to the South had been worth the lack of leg room.  
  
“I can’t believe that’s all you brought,” Jessica says as Sam grabs his duffel from the back of the truck. She has an oversized purse slung over one shoulder as she struggles with her massive roller suitcase. Sam nudges her aside and takes the handle, lifting it down for her.  
  
She gives him a brilliant smile and wheels off towards the house just in time to reveal Brady giving him another exaggerated grin. Sam rolls his eyes before following Jess and Zach up the steps to the front door.  
  
It’s a relief to step into the well air-conditioned interior and out of the humid South Carolina morning air. The foyer rises up the full two stories, disrupted by an archway into the living room straight ahead. The wainscoting and trim are all rich, dark woods.  
  
“Okay, so, I can show you guys to your rooms and you can drop your stuff off,” Zach says.  
  
He leads them off to the right and back the way they came. Sam’s been in a lot of houses, but his experience with mansions tend to be of the old, haunted Victorian kind. This one is probably only a few years old and seems designed to be long and narrow. The neighboring houses are crowded close, maximizing the number of properties with access to the beach. At the far end is a broad staircase that forms a wide square around a wrought iron chandelier.  
  
“That’s the elevator,” Zach says, pointing to an innocuous wooden door at the bottom. “In case any of your drunk asses can’t make it up the stairs.”  
  
‘Elevator,’ Jess mouths at Sam, eyes wide.  
  
Sam grins back and grabs the handle on her suitcase to carry it up the stairs. Brady is shunted off to a side room. The three make their way all the way back across the second floor until Zach directs them over the walkway atop the wooden arch in the foyer. On the other side he points them into a set of bedrooms with an en-suite.  
  
“You two are good sharing, right?”  
  
“Better than with Brady,” Jess replies with a laugh, rolling her suitcase into a corner.  
  
“I think everyone else is already swimming in the pool, so I’ll leave you to get changed.”  
  
“This place is crazy,” Jess says once Zach’s wandered off.  
  
“Yeah,” Sam agrees. He’s digging through his bag for his swim trunks, a new purchase. He’d outgrown his last pair after his most recent growth spurt. It’s annoying because he had to buy them new, for lack of any options at the thrift store. “Doesn’t seem real.”  
  
“Listen,” Jess says, her hands on her hips with mock seriousness. “Don’t get too enamored with all this.”  
  
“Oh yeah?” Sam asks. “Why’s that?”  
  
“Well, I know you have plans to be a big, rich lawyer with his own fancy vacation homes.”

“I don’t know about all that.”  
  
“Good,” Jess says. “Because I want you to know that when the revolution comes, I’m siding with the proletariat.”  
  
It surprises a bark of laughter out of Sam.  
  
“I mean it! I will let the angry mob right in, pitchforks and torches and all.”  
  
“Noted, comrade.” Sam finally locates the swim trunks. “Uh, I’ll just go in here and change,” he says, gesturing to the bathroom.  
  
They’ve gone on a couple of dates and fooled around a bit, but it’s still a little early to be sharing a room—sharing a bed. Sam had thought that a lifetime of cramped motel rooms and shabby one-room apartments had left him without much body consciousness, but he finds himself embarrassingly shy around Jess. He wishes he could channel some of Dean’s cockiness, but he’s just as sure that he’d only embarrass himself more.  
  
When he gets back out of the bathroom Jess has also changed into her swimsuit, an athletic-looking bikini. His face heats and he ducks his head as he shoves his dirty clothes back into his duffel. Jess laughs at him and grabs his arm. “C’mon, Sam!”

 

* * *

  
  
The house has an inground pool and hot tub and a patio filled with wicker couches and plastic furniture. Sam knows some of the people—Brady, of course, and Zach’s sister Becky, and Luis and his girlfriend—but others are friends of Zach’s or Becky’s whom he doesn’t recognize. There’s a table near the door that’s covered with bottles of all kinds of liquor along with a wide selection of mixers. Next to it a keg is chilling in a bucket of ice.  
  
Jess is drawn away into a gaggle of girls and Sam has an awkward moment with no direction before he spots Brady at the makeshift bar, helping himself.  
  
“Hey,” Sam says as he approaches, somewhat cautiously. Brady has been volatile for a few months. He dropped out of pre-med and is doing some sort of business major now.  
  
“Sammy!” Brady says, rounding on him. Sam suppresses the urge to correct him, to tell him that it’s ‘Sam’, because lately that’s more likely to egg Brady on. “What do you want me to make you?”  
  
“I’m good.”  
  
“Nonsense,” Brady says. “It’s still  morning. Ish. How about a Bloody Mary?”  
  
“No thanks.”  
  
“Wait, no, I have just the thing,” Brady says, turning back to the table and grabbing several different bottles of liquor. Sam rolls his eyes as he waits. He’s learned to pick his battles with his roommate.  
  
“Here you are!” Brady says as he garnishes the red plastic cup with an orange slice. “The perfect drink for a beach vacation: a zombie.”  
  
Sam frowns, but takes a sip. It’s sweet, fruity, and heavy on the rum. He’d been relieved at the end of freshman year when Brady had suggested they room together again for sophomore year. They got along well and Brady had been a great study partner. But ever since Thanksgiving he’s been different. Sam’s tried to help, but he doesn’t know what he can do. It’s putting him on edge, like living with a time bomb. For someone who has no idea about Sam’s family or history, he has an uncanny knack for pushing all of Sam’s buttons.  
  
Sam wanders away, over to the seats next to the pool, where Becky is sitting.  
  
“Sam!” she says, hopping up to give him a hug.  
  
“Little Becky.”  
  
“Oh, shove it.”  
  
“So what’s new?” he asks, taking a seat in one of the loungers.  
  
“Ugh, Angela is just being morbid,” Becky says, shooting a look at the brunette on her other side, who gives him an appraising once over.  
  
Sam ignores the sizing up and proffers his hand. “Hi Angela, I’m Sam.”  
  
After they shake Angela leans forward as if she’s about to tell a secret. “I was just telling Becky about the body they found.”  
  
Sam feels a chill run down his spine. Old instincts take over. “The body?”  
  
“It was a drowning,” Becky says. “Body washed up on shore a couple days ago. It’s sad, but it happens.”  
  
“Yeah, but how do you explain all the other stuff?” Angela snaps.  
  
“Other stuff?” Sam echoes.  
  
Angela turns to him, clearly happy to have someone share her interest. “The body was all bruised up. And, get this: it was missing its eyes and teeth and nails. Creepy, right?”  
  
Sam nods absently. “Yeah.” He’s running through monsters in his head, but can’t think of anything that matches that M.O. Missing hearts, sure, plenty of monsters chowed down on those. But missing eyes and teeth? That’s weird.  
  
“You’re gross,” Becky tells Angela.  
  
“Actually, it’s not that unusual,” Sam opines, thinking back to lessons from John. “After death a lot of animals will eat the softer tissues, like eyes.  Of course, that doesn’t explain the teeth.”  
  
He looks up to find matched horrified and disgusted looks on both girls faces. It appears there’s a limit  to Angela’s morbid curiosity. He ducks his head as his face heats and makes a dumb excuse before standing and walking away.  
  
Stupid, Winchester. What’s next, was he going to talk about digging up graves? This wasn’t the first time it had happened, not the first time he’d said something he considered innocuous only to realize that it marked him out as weird. It was especially bad the first few months. He’s better now, after a year and a half of living like a normal person, better at pretending to be one of them. Fitting in has been getting more natural. But then something like this happens and he’s back to feeling like he’ll never escape.  
  
Except he will. Because he was right, bodies missing their eyes or fingernails aren’t that out of the norm. There are animals other than monsters. And even if it was something weird, something supernatural, it’s someone else’s problem. Sam is a college student on spring break. He’s not a hunter.  
  
Not anymore.  
  
He knocks back his drink and goes to find Jessica.

 

* * *

  
  
About half of the group eventually migrates their way down the private boardwalk to the beach. The house has a prime location looking out over open ocean. They walk along the wide expanse of sand at low tide, weaving from pushing each other into the surf to kicking sand at each other. The girls stop to pick up seashells for souvenirs. Most of the group have plastic water bottles filled with conspicuously colorful mixed drinks.  
  
Sam strolls next to Jessica, who is complaining alternately about her exams from last term and her course load next quarter. Sam is trying to commiserate, but he has a hard time dredging up the same annoyance at his studies that his peers feel. He’s got a good sense of perspective. It could be a lot worse.  
  
“Heads up!”  
  
Sam looks up just in time to catch the football sailing at his head. He tosses it back to Luis, who’s trading passes with Brady. How Brady has that much hand-eye coordination given the alcohol he’s downed is anyone’s guess.  
  
“I took that poli sci class,” Sam tells Jess. “I could give you my notes.”  
  
“That’d be awesome,” Jess says. “Your notes—”  
  
Someone screams.  
  
Sam steps forward, pushing Jess slightly behind him as he scans the beach. Adrenaline tingles down his arms and legs and he instinctively loosens his stance for the fight.  
  
But the only thing he sees are a couple of the girls staring at something on the sand near the surf. Jess pushes past him and Sam gives chase.  
  
One of the girls is Angela. She’s hugging a sobbing girl to her. Sam meets her eyes briefly—her tanned face is pale with horror—before moving closer.  
  
It’s a body.  
  
“Anyone have a phone?” he asks. Sam’s is back at the house with the rest of his stuff.  
  
Heads shake all around. “I’ll go flag someone down,” Luis says before heading inland.  
  
Most of the group is hanging back. Jess is rubbing her hand up and down the crying girl’s back and avoiding the scene, her mouth set in a grim line.  
  
“That’s messed up.”  
  
Sam looks to find Brady standing on the other side of the corpse. Brady is staring down at the body dispassionately. For a moment Sam wants to yell at him, question his callousness, until he remembers that Brady had been pre-med, at least for a while. He used to volunteer at hospitals, trying to beef up his resume for med school. He’s probably seen bodies before.  
  
Sam looks back at the body. It’s a young woman. She’s dressed in running shorts and a tank top. The skin of her legs and arms is mottled with bruises, darker purple against the blue tint of her skin. The gaping holes where her eyes should be stare straight into the sky.  
  
Crouching down, Sam looks at one of her out flung arms. Her hand is curled in and he can see that most of her fingernails are missing, the nailbeds raw and bloody. There are scrapes along her fingers and knuckles, small ones. Her mouth is almost completely closed and he doesn’t want to touch the body, so he can’t be sure, but he’d be willing to bet that she was missing some teeth as well.  
  
“So, what do you think?” Brady asks.  
  
Sam looks up to find his friend staring right at him. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean that it’s weird, right?”  
  
“It’s a dead body,” Sam says, as drily as he can manage. “Yeah, that’s weird.”  
  
Brady gives him an indecipherable look, but Sam ignores it in favor of searching for any other clues. He doesn’t want to touch or move her, but this is going to be Sam’s best chance at getting a look at any of the bodies. His experiences with dead bodies have been pretty fleeting in the past, usually a quick glance at a desiccated corpse before they got salted and burned. Or someone freshly dead in the course of a hunt. Sam’s never had to study one; his dad was the one who conned his way into morgues.  
  
But now Sam needs to make sure he doesn’t miss anything. Because this is a hunt. Sam knows it.

More importantly, he can’t ignore it. He’s as surprised by that as his dad would be.  
  
For as grisly as the eyeless body is, there isn’t any obvious outward cause of death. Lots of contusions and abrasions, no lacerations. Probably drowning, but he’ll have to wait for the medical examiner’s report, if he can get his hands on it.  
  
The police eventually arrive and ask them a few questions. Sam uses the opportunity to play concerned tourist and quiz them about the previous body. Luckily the younger cop is a bit of a gossip. He spills to Sam that the other body had been found about a mile farther north on the beach. Other than apparent cause of death, the two victims don’t seem to share much in common. This woman was young and white, the first body was an older black male. She worked part time as a yoga instructor on the island, the man was a wealthy tourist.  
  
It’s only midafternoon, but the party has sobered up. They head back along the beach directly, a more subdued group.  
  
Sam considers his options. He still remembers John’s cell phone number, the ten digits burned into his brain. He could call his dad, try to pass the hunt along. But John and him didn’t exactly leave things on the best terms.  
  
He could call one of their other contacts. He has the numbers for Bobby and Pastor Jim. But both of them are nearly a full day away. And if Sam’s honest with himself, he doesn’t trust them not to report back to John. Or Dean. He has a new life. He likes his new life. He doesn’t want to mix the two.  
  
Even if that means he has to do the hunt himself.  
  
Well, it makes sense in his head, at least.  
  
Sam takes Zach aside as they reach the house. “Hey, can I borrow a car?”  
  
Zach gives him a confused look.  
  
“I swear I’m sober,” Sam says with the most reassuring smile he can manage, the kind that has calmed nervous motel managers and suspicious teachers across the lower forty-eight.  
  
“Where are you going?”  
  
“I just wanted to pick something up,” Sam says. “For Jess.”  
  
Whatever Zach reads into that gives him a grin to match Brady. The Warrens are generous, Becky and Zach almost incautiously so. Zach shows him to the three car garage, each section of which has a different luxury car waiting. He gives Sam the keys to a BMW. He's not sure what it says that Zach doesn't trust him with the Porsche.  
  
Sam’s driven the Impala a couple dozen times, long enough to get a legitimate driver’s license. He’s driven a few stolen cars when things got really bad. But he’s never driven a car this nice.  
  
Dean would kill him for saying that.  
  
He pushes that thought away. Hard.  
  
The police officer had told Sam that the public library was near the mall, on the other end of the island. The acceleration is smooth, the car quiet in a way that the Impala never was.  
  
Sam finds the library and it’s fortunately still open, though only for another couple of hours. On a beautiful weekday like today it’s pretty dead inside. Sam commandeers the microfiche reader and skims through as many articles as he can. The librarian who helps get him started mentions that if he can’t find what he’s looking for there’s also a private library on the island dedicated to historical information about the Low Country. Sam thanks her for her help, insists what she’s given him is more than enough. Inwardly he scoffs. A private library. Typical.  
  
He begins to skim the archived papers. Hilton Head is a small community and well-off. There’s not a lot of crime so any strange deaths end up front page news.  
  
There is the occasional death of a prominent member of the community that rises to the front page. Most of them are from natural causes. There are a couple more mundane murders: gun violence, crimes of passion, all the usual. There are some drownings that Sam makes note of. The articles don’t mention missing eyes or teeth or nails, but that’s probably too gory for the Beaufort Gazette. None of the drownings are temporally clustered like the ones this week. Any one of them could’ve given birth to a vengeful spirit, but they’re all thought to be accidental, not the stereotypical violent end.  
  
He makes it as far back as 1989 when he hits pay dirt.  
  
Stephanie Olson, 19, was tagging along on her father’s business trip and staying at the Westin Resort. She left the hotel in the early hours of March 30, 1979 and disappeared. She was found later that morning on the beach, beaten to death. No mention of eyes or teeth or nails, but it matches the bruising and being found on the beach. When he checks up on her name in the computerized archives he finds that the murder is still unsolved. Plenty of vengeful ghost material.  
  
After that it’s relatively easy to call around and make up a sob story about being a distant relative who wants to visit her grave. The articles said she was a Georgia resident, and as it turns out she’s buried outside Savannah, maybe only an hour drive.  
  
The library is closing down.  
  
Sam should head back. The group is  grilling out tonight. The two deaths so far have come a couple days apart, so there’s no rush, but Sam just wants this over with.  
  
He calls Zach and makes an excuse about hearing from an old family friend in Savannah. Zach seems confused, but Sam talks over him, the old Winchester bluster rolling off his tongue. You just keep talking and people often cave under the weight of all the words. It's easy with Zach. He knows Sam, trusts him.  
  
Sam tries not to think about how he's betraying that trust.  
  
He stops at the first hardware store he passes, just off the island. Drops more cash than he’s comfortable with on a shovel, lighter fluid, and the only bag of road salt. He wouldn’t say no to a weapon of some kind, but they’re pricey and hunting is risky enough without compounding it by stealing.  
  
Sam drives into the sunset and across the South Carolina/Georgia border. He parks several blocks away from the cemetery just as the sun is setting, makes sure it’s a legal parking spot. He doesn’t want to deal with getting the Warrens’ car towed.  
  
A simple chain link fence surrounds the cemetery. He throws over his supplies and clambers up in two quick steps.  
  
It’s a newer cemetery and Sam’s already looked up the plot. It only takes a few moments to get himself oriented. Sam knows graveyards like other people his age know malls.  
  
Digging is slow. Sam’s stronger than the last time he helped dig a grave, but last time he had help.  
  
For a moment he considers whether he could’ve asked for help with this one. This hunt has been pretty open and shut, so he hasn’t really been tempted. But here with nothing but the dirt crunching under his shovel he has plenty of time to think. He could have called John. He would have probably picked up, he always picked up, but would he have actually listened to what Sam has to say? In the battle between hunting evil and listening to his son, Sam’s not entirely sure where John would land.  
  
Hours pass. The night is cooler, but not by much. Sam’s long since shed his flannel and is down to just his undershirt, but he regrets wearing jeans instead of the khaki shorts he packed. Better for scaling fences, less optimal for hours of heavy labor.  
  
It’s just past three in the morning when his shovel _thunks_ against coffin. He tosses out the last few shovelfuls of dirt and uses the edge of the shovel to pry open the coffin lid. Stephanie’s corpse is shriveled with decay. Sam looks around, senses on high alert. This is usually the part when the ghost shows up to throw him into a headstone—though in this part of the cemetery most of the markers are flat plaques and flush with the ground.  
  
He climbs back out of the hole and douses the corpse liberally with salt. No point in conserving it, he’s probably going to have to toss the rest anyway. No good way to explain why he’s carrying around road salt in South Carolina in March. He only holds back a bit, for self-protection.  
  
The lighter fluid is next. That he saves some of—the party might be able to use it for a bonfire.  
  
He strikes up a match, lets it burn down for a second so it doesn’t flame out, and tosses it down.  
  
The heat rises up, dry in contrast to the muggy Georgia night. He steps back, already dripping with sweat, running in rivulets that make tracks through the dirt caked onto his forearms.  
  
When the fire burns down he pushes dirt back into the hole as quickly as he can. By the time the ground is mostly leveled out the sky to the east is fading into a light gray. He hops the fence again and is back on the road, squinting against the glare as he again heads into the sun.  
  
He stops at a gas station and rinses all the visible dirt from his arms and face, but still feels grimy. It’s early by the time he pulls back into the driveway of the house. He hasn’t even been here for 24 hours and he’s running on fumes.  
  
The house is quiet when he enters. He imagines they won’t be getting up particularly early.  
  
Which is why he’s surprised when he opens the door to his shared bedroom with Jess and finds her standing in front of the dresser mirror, pulling her hair into a ponytail. She’s plenty surprised, too.  
  
“Sam!”  
  
“Uh. Hi.”  
  
“Where the hell were you?”  
  
Sam isn’t sure if she’s mad or concerned. Possibly both. “Uh, a friend of the family called me. He lives in Savannah.”  
  
“So you just took off?”  
  
Sam reaches for the standard Winchester claptrap and finds… nothing. He doesn’t want to lie like this to her. He looks down at his feet. His sneakers are coated in a layer of grave dirt.  
  
Jess sighs. “A family friend?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“You never talk about your family.”  
  
“Right. I know. I’m sorry.”  
  
She crosses her arms over her chest. “It’s fine, Sam," she says in a tone that says how not fine it was. "I know there are things you’re not telling me. But I was worried. You could’ve called.”  
  
He doesn’t really know how to answer to that. She’s right, of course. He could have called. But he’s not used to answering to anyone that closely. Sure, John had called them every few days, but Sam was only gone a few hours. It hadn’t even occurred to him. Another social oddity from his upbringing.

The silence between them stretches out in the dawn light. The windows in their room look out east over the ocean, and the sun is rising somewhere out of sight to the south.  
  
Jess sighs again. “Becky set up a beach yoga session. Do you want to come?”  
  
Honestly, Sam wants to take a shower and collapse into bed for the next fourteen hours. But he didn’t come on vacation to sleep and he can’t say no to the hopeful smile on Jessica’s face. Besides, he’s pretty used to long nights and little sleep, even before he went to college, so he nods and searches out his running gear.  
  
Downstairs Becky has decided to become Sam’s personal hero by brewing up a large pot of good, strong coffee. The rest of the yoga group—mostly girls—seem to be drinking it to stave off their hangovers. When the instructor shows up she brings a big carafe of some sort of green health juice. Some of the girls give look at it suspiciously, but Sam tries it and finds that it’s actually pretty good.

If Dean saw him drinking it he’d never hear the end of it.  
  
He must be more tired than he thought.  
  
They chat for another few minutes and then make their way back down the narrow wooden boardwalk to the beach. In place of yoga mats they’ve brought beach towels which the house has a ready supply of. The tide is high, but there’s just enough clear beach to spread the towels out next to each other with room for the instructor to walk along the receding surf.  
  
The group is still half hungover and sleep deprived so it’s not the most rigorous workout. Sam’s thankful, his shoulders and arms are still tight from moving all that dirt. Half of the girls can’t even hold downward-facing dog pose for more than a few seconds without collapsing into giggles.  
  
Sam stakes out a spot on the end, next to Jess, and mostly ignores their antics, focusing instead on the calm pulse of the waves. The sun is still low, so it’s not hot, but it’s muggy and he’s instantly covered in a thin sheen of sweat.  
  
Half an hour in the instructor has them pair up to do partner yoga poses. The laughter increases as the girls try to balance while propped up against each other.  
  
Sam tries to wave Jess off.  
  
“C’mon, you can’t leave me stuck with these shrimps, Sam!”  
  
The girl on the other side of Jess, who probably tops out at 5’ 2”, laughs and gives her the finger. “We can’t all be Amazons.”  
  
“See, Sam? You’re my only hope.”  
  
He caves.

The instructor pulls Becky to the front of the group to demonstrate with her. They start simple, pressed back to back. Sam glances over his shoulder. “Sorry about all the sweat.” With her back squashed up against his he can feel himself soaking through his shirt.  
  
“Oh, yeah, because I’m really smelling like roses right now.”  
  
He smiles.  
  
Sam’s not the horn dog his brother is, but there’s something strangely intimate about the simple poses, even if the only point of contact are the soles of their feet pressed together as they grasp each other’s wrists. Sam counts himself fortunate that his face is probably already red with exertion.  
  
Afterwards a bunch of them run into the surf to cool off. Jess hangs back, only wading in knee high, until Sam manages to sneak up behind her and sweep her over his shoulder. He tosses her, shrieking with laughter, into the waves.  
  
When she comes up sputtering he lets her push him over in retaliation. It’s only fair.  
  
By the time they all make it back to the house the rest of the gang is awake. Luis is frying up pancakes. He offers Sam a stack, but Sam waves him off. He’s running on fumes at this point. He needs at least a couple hours of sleep.  
  
He showers on autopilot, changes into the first thing that comes to hand, and falls into bed.

 

* * *

  
  
Sam wakes up to the distant sound of laughter. He squints his eyes open against the bright sunlight streaming in through the balcony doors. Now that he is listening he can hear the murmur of people talking, probably on the back patio.  
  
The small clock radio on the nightstand says it’s almost one in the afternoon. More than enough sleep for a Winchester.  
  
He sits up, runs an absent hand through his hair to smooth it down. After catching another burst of laughter he ambles over to the large French doors that lead to the balcony outside his room. When he cracks them open the damp heat immediately leeches in. He steps out and up to the railing, looking out over the backyard, which is filled with people swimming or sitting around and drinking while doing either.  
  
“Sam!” That’s Zach. “About time!”  
  
“You’re one to talk,” Sam shoots back. He can’t count the number of times Zach’s stood up early study dates because he overslept.  
  
Jess smiles up at him from the pool. “Get down here!”  
  
He doesn’t need to be told twice.  
  
The pool feels amazing compared to the heat of the day. Sam swims a couple very short, quick laps. Jess is floating on an inflatable that looks like a donut in the deep end. When he paddles his way over she tries to dunk his head, so he feels justified when he upends her tube and dumps her into the water. Jess was on the swim team in high school and is actually a much better swimmer. Sam swam in a couple of high school gym classes and the occasional motel pool or lake. He fell into a river fully clothed, once. Sam swims like he fights, anything goes as long it works. Jess, on the other hand, swims like she’s part mermaid. She comes up sputtering and Sam makes a strategic retreat towards the shallow end where he has the advantage. She yells threats at him but doesn’t give chase.  
  
They spend the afternoon lazing around. Occasionally small groups trek down the boardwalk to the beach. Jess brought a book and sets up shop sprawled out on a towel there for a while. Sam didn’t bring a book, hasn’t bought any novels since high school stopped forcing him to for English class. His textbooks are expensive enough. Sam doesn’t have a lot of spare cash and what he does have he tends to save for dates with Jess.  
  
But there’s a decently well-stocked bookshelf in the house, so he pokes through it. It was clearly curated by Zach’s mom, is full of chick lit titles in pastel covers. Dotted here and there are outliers—Bret Easton Ellis, Ayn Rand, Hemingway. Sam selects one of the latter.  
  
He stretches out next to Jess as she slathers on another layer of sunscreen. Sam’s always been lucky to tan instead of burn, unlike Dean, who tended to end up extra crispy every summer.  
  
“Fun beach read?” Jess teases after catching the cover on his book.  
  
“You’ve got some sunscreen right here,” Sam says, rubbing his nose with his middle finger. She laughs. “Aren’t you a little old for those books?” he asks.  
  
Jess is reading one of the Harry Potter books. Sam doesn’t know which one.  
  
“They’re good,” she defends. “And this one is thick enough that I hopefully won’t finish it before we head back.”  
  
Sam can’t argue with that.  
  
That night the gang grills out again. Sam helps Zach at the grill, stays sober enough that all the chicken skewers get cooked sufficiently. Brady stumbles in halfway through dinner, still in his clothes from the previous day. He pours himself a pint glass of whiskey, downs most of it, and disappears upstairs.  
  
“I have no idea how his liver is still functioning,” Zach admits. Sam, being Brady’s roommate, is more than familiar with his friend’s burgeoning alcoholism. “What happened at Fall Break?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Sam says, because it’s the truth. Brady left after Fall Quarter as a confident-but-hard-working pre-med student and came back from the week off changed. Most of their friends have chalked it up to stress, as indicated by the change in majors.  
  
Sam has tried to help, but Brady hasn’t exactly been interested in talking it out.  
  
Brady was his first friend at Stanford. Sam owes him a lot.  
  
So he follows his roommate into the house and knocks cautiously on the door to Brady’s suite.  
  
The door swings open an instant later. Like maybe Brady was waiting for him.  
  
“Sam!” Brady says, all smiles. For as much as he drank, he seems remarkably sober.  
  
“Hey, Brady,” Sam says. “What’s up?”  
  
“I was just gonna crash, dude. Been a long night,” he says with a grin so lecherous that even Dean would find it over-the-top.  
  
“You were gone a long time,” Sam tries.  
  
Brady rolls his eyes. “What, only Sam Winchester is allowed to vanish all night?”  
  
It’s a valid point, but Sam doesn’t let it deter him. “I just want to make sure you’re okay. That you’re safe.”  
  
“You asking if I used protection?” Brady asks, smirking.  
  
Sam pulls a face. “Dude. That’s your business, but nobody knew where you were. You were gone almost a full day. What if something happened?”  
  
“I can take care of myself, Sam,” he drawls. “And if anyone tried anything?” He reaches into his pocket and before Sam can see what it is the blade flips outward. It’s a switchblade, good sized.  
  
“Holy shit, where’d you get that?”  
  
“Brought it in my checked bag,” Brady says, the light catching on the blade as he turns it side to side, before locking it back down.  
  
A queasy feeling surges through Sam’s stomach. He’d always hid the few weapons he’d brought to California from Brady, but freshman year Sam broke his nose and Brady almost fainted watching the fight. He had no stomach for violence. Now he’s carrying a questionably legal knife?  
  
“So, see?” Brady continues. “No reason to worry.” He steps back and slams the door shut.  
  
Sam retreats back downstairs. He has no idea what to do for his friend. He wants to do something to help before Brady gets himself hurt. But he’s also starting to worry for himself. Brady’s his roommate. He’d assumed that they’d live together again next year, but now he’s not so sure it’s a good idea.  
  
Sam tries to put it out of his mind. This is a vacation. He grabs a beer and Luis pulls him into a discussion about the next presidential election that manages to end without anyone screaming obscenities. Jess joins quickly, drawn as if with a sixth sense to any political talk.  
  
The party goes until the early hours of the morning, but Sam and Jess sneak away just before midnight.

 

* * *

  
  
There’s no beach yoga the next day, so Sam and Jess wake slowly and spend a lazy morning together before getting ready and heading downstairs just before noon. Becky has planned lunch at a restaurant on the leeward side of the island before they take a “dolphin nature cruise”.  
  
Becky assures them all that the bill is being covered by her parents, so Sam is able to appreciate the upscale restaurant without doing a panicked calculation of his bank account. He hasn’t had seafood too often, and certainly never from a place like this, so he doesn’t have much to compare to.  
  
After taking his first bite of the lobster tail he leans over to Jess. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“For what?” She asks around a mouth of pasta.  
  
“For my inevitable betrayal of the proletariat,” he replies solemnly and watches her choke on a laugh and a biscuit. “This is delicious.”  
  
“That’s all it takes to forsake the working class?” Jess chides.  
  
“Apparently.”  
  
Halfway through lunch Jess and Angela leave to find the bathroom and when they come back Jess’s face is grim, while Angela seems to be buzzing with excitement.  
  
Sam’s about to ask what happened, but Angela beats him to the punch. “They found another body.”  
  
Jess shoots her an affronted glare and one of the girls turns a little green.  
  
Sam feels his stomach drop.  
  
Angela sits down and leans forward eagerly. “Do you think it’s a serial killer or something?”  
  
“A serial killer who pokes out eyes?” Brady scoffs.  
  
“Oh my God, guys, stop it!” one of the girls says.  
  
Sam leans across Jess towards Angela. “Did you hear where they found it?”  
  
“By some Bed and Breakfast. Royal something.”  
  
Something in that registers to Becky. “What? That’s not far from the house.”  
  
Sam gets what he can out of Angela and begs off of the cruise, citing an upset stomach. Becky gives him the keys to the BMW she’d driven over in. Jess offers to stay behind as well, but Sam insists she go on the cruise.  
  
He finds his way to the private library he’d been told about. It’s run by the Mormon church, which makes sense. Mormons are very invested in genealogy and ancestry, which makes them useful resources on hunts. Sam’s still offended on a visceral level at the idea of a private library—he has to pay a $10 entrance fee to use the facilities—but he has to grudgingly admit that it’s got better resources than the public library farther north.  
  
He’s found a tourist map of the island and marked off the approximate locations of the bodies. They descend in a line along the beach on the ocean-facing side of the island, starting at the island’s halfway point and trailing down towards the Warrens’ beach house.  
  
This time he skips the newspapers and goes straight to EBSCOhost. If there’s one hunting advantage to attending Stanford, it’s that it’s improved his research skills. He’s fluent in regular expressions.  
  
The wide geographic variance is making him question his assumption that it was a vengeful spirit, so instead he starts by searching the commonalities: bodies with missing eyes, teeth, and fingernails. And after paging through some entries about serial killers, he finds something that works.  
  
It’s a description of a creature from a 16th century ethnographic study of Mesoamerica written by a Franciscan friar. The creature was called an “ahuizotl” in the native language and it’s described as vaguely dog shaped. Apparently the creatures grab unsuspecting victims and drown them while munching on their eyes and crunchy bits like the teeth and fingernails. Ahuizotl victims are often bruised as if they’ve been battered, but otherwise unblemished. It sometimes lures its victims to the water with a cry that mimics the sound of a baby or small child weeping.

No explanation for why it’s in South Carolina instead of Mexico, but Sam just chalks that one up to global warming.  
  
It’s enough to convince Sam. Unfortunately, the good friar didn’t mention how to put the damn thing down. But if it’s corporeal Sam should be able to kill it with enough effort.  
  
If it bleeds, you can kill it.  
  
There’s another disturbing pattern emerging. There were three days between the first death and the second, but only two between the second and third. Too few data points to form a definitive pattern, but there’s a chance the next murder will be tonight. And if the creature follows its current path, it’ll be attacking near the Warrens’ house next.  
  
That’s as far as he gets before Becky calls him up and tells him they’re back from the cruise. He picks them up and everyone makes their way back to the beach house. Jess asks him if something is wrong when Sam’s quiet in the car, but he blames it on his stomach. In reality, he’s busy trying to figure out how to finish this hunt.  
  
He needs supplies. A gun would be preferable, but he has no way to get one right now. He needs salt, which hopefully the Warrens have. He’s still got the lighter fluid from the salt and burn and another couple books of matches.  
  
When they arrive back at the house Sam looks through the pantry, which is a room long enough that Sam could lie down inside it. He finds a large canister of salt, enough to salt a body, if not enough to put down any substantial salt lines. That’s fine. Even if he could be sure it’d work against the ahuizotl, this house has so many doors and windows that it’d be pointless to try. Not to mention the questions it’d lead to from his fellow spring breakers.  
  
As casually as he can Sam carries the supplies out of the house, down towards the beach. Thankfully no one notices. He hides them under the boardwalk. From what he can gather, each of the victims has disappeared at night—the first from a beachfront party, the second a night jog, and the third from among another spring break group swimming at night.  
  
So Sam still has a couple of hours to kill before he needs to be on the hunt.  
  
Enough time for second thoughts.  
  
He should really call for back-up. He’s never done a hunt solo before. Heck, even Dean didn’t hunt alone. John warned them against it—granted, he did it anyway, but Dad’s always been a bit of the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ type.  
  
He should at least let _someone_ know what he’s found. Just in case.  
  
He scrolls through the contact list in his phone, but he can’t make himself dial. He’s not exactly sure what’s stopping him. It just feels too much like going back and Sam can’t go back, can’t do anything but move forward. He has to. He just needs to get through this hunt and then it’ll be over and he can go back to his life.  
  
But first, he needs a weapon. His first thought is to grab one of the kitchen knives, but they generally don’t hold up too well in a fight. Besides, he doesn’t want to ruin the Warrens’ nice cutlery.  
  
He’s heading back up to his room when the obvious answer strikes him.  
  
Brady.  
  
He’s standing outside the door to Brady’s suite.  
  
It’s his best bet. He’s got two options: steal the knife somehow and hope Brady doesn’t miss it or try and convince him to let Sam borrow it.  
  
He has no idea what he’d say to explain why he suddenly needs a switchblade.  
  
So pickpocketing it is.  
  
The group orders pizza. Someone made a booze run so their makeshift bar is freshly restocked and no one waits for an invitation. It’s only March and the sun doesn’t set particularly late, but Sam still has some time to kill before he figures the ahuizotl will be hunting.  
  
Sam’s a halfway decent pickpocket, but he wants to wait as long as possible, hoping that his roommate might get drunk enough that he won’t notice. Brady’s certainly giving it his all.  
  
And he isn’t alone. The group bonded pretty well in the past few days and are clearly intent on getting rowdy that night. They set up a table for beer pong and another one for flip cup, which taps the keg early, so they move on to the liquor. Sam misses when Becky raids the houses’ wine cellar—which isn’t an actual cellar, more of a wine closet off the kitchen, but still. A wine cellar. Jess was right about this house. Not that Jess seems to mind the existence of a wine cellar as she’s getting blitzed on chardonnay.  
  
Sam makes himself some virgin drinks as camouflage and plays along with the crowd.  
  
The last rays of sunlight have just vanished and Sam’s trying to figure out how to make his escape when it all goes to hell.  
  
Predictably, it’s Brady’s fault.  
  
Sam’s roommate climbs onto the abandoned beer pong table and screams “skinny dipping!”  
  
A few roll their eyes, but plenty seem into the idea. Brady starts stripping off his clothes while still standing on the table.  
  
“Get off, Brady!” Zach yells, throwing a hand in front of his face theatrically.  
  
“Oh, I’m trying to, Warren!”  
  
Some of the girls strip down to their underwear, a couple down to the swimsuits under their clothes, but they start running through the short yard and down the boardwalk. Brady, fully nude, gives chase.  
  
Well, at least that solves one problem.  
  
Sam rifles through the pockets of Brady’s abandoned shorts and finds the switchblade. He pockets it before taking off after the group. By the time he makes it down to the shore people are already running into the pounding waves. The tide is low, revealing an eternity of sandy beach.  
  
Fuck.  
  
Angela is standing on the berm at the edge of the beach, rubbing her upper arms nervously.  
  
“You okay?” Sam asks, still keeping an eye on the group crashing around the surf.  
  
“I don’t think we should be out here. What with the murders, you know?”  
  
She’s probably afraid of a serial killer and not a Mesoamerican monster, but Sam can work with that. “I think you’re right. I’m going to try and get them back to the house.”  
  
She nods.  
  
Sam heads down the beach. He counted seven people when they first left the house and he still counts that many heads splashing around in the surf. He can see Jess’s blonde curls.  
  
He doesn’t really want to draw attention to himself, since he was hoping to slip away to take care of the monster himself. And after more than a year at college—and several months of dealing with Brady—he’s also more than familiar with the process of wrangling drunk friends, which requires a little reverse psychology. Telling them to get out of the water will probably do more harm than good.  
  
There’s also the small matter of not being entirely sure how to track a creature that spends most of its time underwater.  
  
He’s not using his friends as bait.  
  
He’s _not_.  
  
Fortunately they tire themselves out quickly, most moving back towards the house. Jess and Brady are some of the last to stagger up the wide expanse of beach.  
  
“C’mon Jess, looks like your boyfriend is being a little bitch,” Brady says to her in a stage whisper that’s closer to a shout.  
  
“Sa-am,” Jess whines theatrically as she stumbles a little. She’s drunker than Sam thought.  
  
Sam tries for a grin, hoping to deflect any attention.  
  
“Come on, guys,” Angela calls nervously, casting hesitant looks up and down the beach. Sam’s not entirely sure what she’s afraid of—the beach and backshore are both flat, with only a few sparse palm trees to break up the view. There’s little chance that any attacker would be able to sneak up on them—at least on land.  
  
Of course, Angela probably hasn’t analyzed the terrain with a tactical eye because that’s not a thing normal college students do. Sam’s torn between envy and annoyance. Sometimes he wonders if he’ll eventually be like them, oblivious to the world around them. He wonders if that’s even possible or if he’ll always have John Winchester’s lessons carved into his psyche.  
  
Nights like this, he’s not sure which he’d prefer.  
  
Sam is leading Jess up the beach with a hand at the small of her back, pressed up against her wet t-shirt, when he hears it.  
  
A sharp, high wail. It sounds like a child, a baby.  
  
Jess and Brady turn towards the ocean.  
  
“What was that?” Jess asks.  
  
“It’s nothing,” Sam replies, but he’s cut off from saying more by another piercing cry. It’s the kind of scream that pings a person’s lizard brain, an alarm that says that Something is Wrong.  
  
Jess tears her arm out of Brady’s grip, dodges Sam’s reach, and runs towards the sound. Back towards the water.  
  
“What’s going on, what is that?” Angela asks.  
  
Sam spares a moment to tell her, “it’s okay,” before chasing after Jess.  
  
His girlfriend is standing ankle-deep in the surf, staring out into the night. Her water-dark hair is plastered to her back.  
  
Sam’s only feet away when a larger wave crests, surging up and over her knees and that’s when he sees it. A dark shape, solid where the ocean is fluid.  
  
Jess’ legs go out from under her as she’s pulled forward, disappearing beneath the waves with only a gasp.  
  
“Jess!” Sam screams, diving forward.  
  
He reaches out and his hands close in on something solid, clothes. He drags himself forward, hooks his arms around Jess’s body. They’re both being pulled forward by whatever has a hold of Jess, deeper into the water. Sam drags his feet along the sandy ocean floor, trying to slow them down.  
  
He kicks at the monster blindly. After a few swipes he connects with something furry, but the drag of the water killed all the momentum and it’s more of a nudge than a kick. But he knows where it is now, so he pulls a leg up and drives it down hard.  
  
There’s a jerk as it lets go and Sam pushes against the bottom, striving for the surface. They break into the warm air only moments later, Sam holding Jess up against him. She gasps and flails, elbow catching Sam’s cheek, but he manages to keep hold of her as his head spins. He catches sight of the shore, the bright lights of the beach houses, and propels them in that direction. They hadn’t been pulled that deep and reach the shallows quickly, staggering out of the surf.  
  
Brady and Angela are there instantly, arms around them, helping them up to the shore.  
  
“Get her back to the house,” Sam tells them, disentangling himself from Jess’ long limbs. She’s dazed and out of it. Sam’s not sure if she hit her head or the alcohol has caught up with her or what.  
  
“What was that?” Angela asks, bordering on hysteria.  
  
“Just get back to the house,” Sam says wearily. His brief underwater battle tired him out and he’s ready to end this.  
  
Angela looks ready to argue, but Brady moves forward and she’s pulled along, helping Jess across the sand.  
  
Sam reaches into the pockets of his now soaked shorts and is relieved to find Brady’s knife still there. He pulls it out, flicks it open. He watches the silhouettes of Jess and Brady and Angela disappear up the boardwalk and takes a deep breath.  
  
Before he can move a wave crashes over his feet and something has a hold of his ankle and it pulls.  
  
Sam falls forward, twisting so he doesn’t land on the knife. The monster pulls him back out with the wave.  
  
The grip on his ankle is tight and unforgiving, but it gives him a point of reference in the pitch black water. He scrunches up his body and grabs for the beast’s body, catches hold of fur. He can feel it stop pulling and then something connects with his ribs, a foot or something, and he loses half his stored air to the gasp it knocks out of him.  
  
He brings the knife up and plunges it into the creature’s body, near where his other hand still has a grip in its fur. The ahuizotl screeches, the sound low and distorted through the water, but it hasn’t given up its grip on Sam’s ankle and his lungs are burning. He needs air soon.  
  
He takes another blow to the chest as he withdraws the knife and stabs it in again. The monster is thrashing. It releases hold on his ankle and he kicks at the sandy ocean floor but the water is churning with limbs and something connects sharply with his temple—

 

* * *

  
  
_Now_  
  
Sam wakes face down in the sand.  
  
The tide is coming in.  
  
He collects Brady’s knife and stands. His ribs ache.  
  
There’s a trail of blood in the sand.  
  
If it bleeds, you can kill it.  
  
The footprints look like those of human hands, with long, thin fingers.  
  
He expects them to veer off into the surf, escaping deep into the ocean where he can’t follow. But instead they trail blood along the berm at the edge of the beach.  
  
When they eventually turn deeper into the scrub brush of the backshore Sam follows slowly. His head is clearing. He listens carefully for any sign of the ahuizotl.  
  
He finds it lying in a low depression, under a sparse bush.  
  
Sam approaches cautiously. The beast sees him coming and raises its head in a growl before flopping back down.  
  
It’s on its side, gasping harshly. The sand beneath it is thick with blood.  
  
What few illustrations existed of the ahuizotl were inexpertly done, conveying little more than that it had four legs and fur. In real life it looks like a dog with a pointier, almost possum-like face. Its fur stands up in tufts and is pitch black, making it hard to see the blood it’s shedding.  Each of its paws are black, but with long fingers, similar to raccoon paws, but larger. Another ‘hand’ is present at the end of its long tail, which flops weakly against the ground. It smells like wet dog.  
  
It whimpers as he approaches and his stomach turns.  
  
He reminds himself that this creature has killed at least three people. That it tried to kill Jess. That it tried to kill him.  
  
But it’s just an animal. It’s not a vengeful spirit or a werewolf or a demon. It’s not _evil_.  
  
Beneath the ahuizotl’s wheezing death rattle is another sound, a softer whimper.  
  
Sam drops to his knees beside the creature. There’s movement against the blood-stained sand, between the monster’s legs.  
  
It—she—had babies.  
  
The puppies are small, their eyes still shut. There are two of them. Their fur is several shades lighter than their mother, but they’re both stained dark with her blood.  
  
It might suggest something about the ahuizotl, about why the information about it is so sparse. About why it probably doesn’t kill humans normally and therefore doesn’t make it onto the radar of hunters.  
  
Sam wipes the back of a hand across his face, feels grains of sand from them stick to his damp cheeks.  
  
This is hunting.  
  
There was a moment, having saved Jess from a monster, where he’d remembered the adrenaline, the satisfaction of saving lives.  
  
But now he remembers the rest.  
  
He grips Brady’s knife tight and does what the job requires.  
  
It’s a relatively short trek back to where he stashed the salt and lighter fluid and matches. He digs a small pit halfway up the beach and deposits the ahuizotl corpses in it. Stacks dry scrub grasses on top. They burn quickly, the way that so many supernatural creatures do. Sam sits beside the pit as the tide rushes in and fills it. The water churns away the ashes.  
  
By the time he returns up the boardwalk the sun is threatening to rise and the house is quiet and dark. Steam rises softly off the heated pool into the cooler night air as he makes his way past.  
  
“Sam.”  
  
He startles. Angela is sitting in one of the large wicker couches. She has a beach wrap pulled around her shoulders.  
  
“Is it…” she trails off. “Did you get it?”  
  
He pauses before nodding.  
  
“What was it?”  
  
He strains for some sort of ‘normal’ explanation. Something that would allow Angela to keep her innocence.  
  
She must see some of the hesitation in his face because she speaks up before he has a chance. “Don’t try to say it was nothing or, or, or a shark or something. There was something in the water. Something grabbed Jess.”  
  
“There was,” he admits.  
  
“You knew,” she says. “You knew it would be out there.”  
  
He shrugs.  
  
“How?”  
  
He’s only just met Angela a few days ago, so she likely doesn’t know much about Sam. She isn’t aware that he doesn’t go home for break. He’s been so successful at deflecting questions about his past or his family that his friends don’t ask anymore. She thought he was just a normal guy, if maybe a little weird.  
  
“My dad taught me,” he says, as simply as he can.  
  
She clearly wants to ask more, but just as clearly is afraid of getting an answer. “It’s gone?”  
  
“It’s dead,” Sam says.  
  
She nods and stands, heading back into the house. Sam holds the door open for her. He replaces the salt in the Warren’s pantry.  
  
Jess is passed out in the massive king bed, snoring softly. Sam changes, brushing sand from his body, before climbing under the covers. The house is air conditioned enough that the bed has a thick comforter on top of the sheets.  
  
Sam tries to tell himself that the heavy weight is comforting, not restricting. Tells himself that he’s safe here, in this massive house with a thousand windows and not a single one of them with salt across the sill.

 

* * *

  
Jess wakes with the hangover from hell and no memory past running down to the beach that night. Sam figures that’s a good thing. He doesn’t want Jess to know about monsters, doesn’t want her to live scared.  
  
Sam gives Brady back his knife, makes up a story about finding it on the back patio after the skinny dipping adventure.  
  
The vacation lasts another three days. No more bodies are found.  
  
Angela avoids Sam like he has the plague. It’s noticeable enough that Becky tries to apologize for her, but Sam waves her off.  
  
It never felt real, that Sam could escape hunting. Before he’d left he pictured Dean dragging him back for hunts during summer vacation. He wasn’t really looking forward to it, but not all hunts were horrible and if it meant keeping his family in his life he was willing to put in the work.  
  
Of course, that all changed when John found out about Sam’s plan.  
  
When he’d salted and burned the body a few days ago it had been hard, tiring, gross work, but he’d felt accomplished. He was saving people.  
  
Killing the ahuizotl didn’t feel like that. It didn’t feel like a win. It felt like looking for a monster and having it turn out to be Amy, the girl he was crushing on.  
  
On their last day Zach drives them down to Savannah to catch an early plane back. The Range Rover is full: Sam and Jess, Luis and his girlfriend, Zach and Brady up front, and Angela wedged into the back. She’s still giving Sam the cold shoulder. He doesn’t blame her.  
  
They’re on the highway off the island, a tall narrow bridge over the swampy marshes and rivers that separate Hilton Head from the mainland. Sam’s dozing, head against the glass, when he hears it. It’s a throaty rumble that’s more familiar to him than his own heartbeat.  
  
He turns and thinks he catches a glimpse of shining black and chrome as it disappears over the other side of the bridge they just crested. His heart hammers in his throat.  
  
“Sam?”  
  
Jess looks concerned. For good reason, given that Sam’s just bolted upright for no apparent reason. She’s glancing over at him, her blonde curls catching the early morning light.  
  
He settles back into the leather seat, in the car taking him to the airport, back to Stanford. Back to his life.  
  
“I’m fine,” he says, smiling thinly. “I’m great.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!  
> I'm pretty useless on social media, but feel free to follow me on [Tumblr](http://julia-sets.tumblr.com/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/julia_sets)


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